My Heart is Hurting by S E Reed - Blog Tour and Review

Hello and welcome to my turn on the blog tour for My Heart Is Hurting by S E Reed. It is a pleasure to welcome you here. Please do have a click around and read some of my other reviews. I read a lot of Young Adult so when I saw this book I signed up for the tour. 

This book was one of the entries for BBNYA which is a competition where indie authors can get their novels read and judged. I was a reader a few years ago but didn't have time to sign up for the full thing, but I was happy to get to read this one. 

Here's the blurb and author bio:

Blurb

Jinny Buffett is lonely…

She’s never had the comfort of a white picket fence with a loving family. Her subsidized apartment in Hollywood Florida echoes with the void of her dead Daddy, and the nights drag long into twilight while her Mama works the block outside the Margaritaville resort.

It’s idealistic Ms. Fleming, who’s brave enough to come knocking first. She wants to see Jinny rise up and use her ace scores to escape the wheel of poverty, convincing Jinny to start a school book club, where she finds the friends and boyfriend she never knew she needed.

But when her Mama spirals out of control and threatens her entire existence, it’s Jinny’s Everglade ancestors who arrive in a mist of magic, bringing the swamp and hope with them.

Author Bio

S.E. Reed lives in the south and writes strange, haunting, real stories of people and places along old highways.

Winner of the 2024 Florida Book Awards and the 2024 Paterson Prize for Books for Young People.

Additionally, she's been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and won honorable mention twice in L. Ron Hubbard's Writers of the Future Contest.

You can find her on X @writingwithreed or visit her website www.writingwithreed.com .

I really liked Jinny and loved her story. She's incredibly lonely. Her mother is neglectful and disappears for weeks at a time. Jinny doesn't trust people easily, so she doesn't trust Ms Fleming. There's a new boy at school, though. Tom. He's just moved and he and Jinny become close. Plus two friends from a while ago reappear and Jinny eventually lets them in. She realises everyone has problems. 

There is some magic with regards to Jinny's dad's family, but I wish it had been a bit more overt and that there was more of it. I also want to say that using the word 'said' is absolutely fine. There were so many synonyms that it was really jarring. That's my critcism really. But generally I liked Jinny and wanted her to succeed.